Holy skull-crunch! The Daily Mail was always going to have a field day with this motherfucker. After all, like Watchmen and its graphic depiction of rape, torture and hot radioactive cock, Kick-Ass is not exactly your conventional, friendly neighbourhood comic-book movie. And after the dust settled on last year's Comic-Con in San Diego, where several scenes from the movie premiered (albeit rough-cut stuff with temporary soundtrack) to euphoric praise from the comic-book fraternity, it was always clear that while Kick-Ass was going to be an easy sell for the geek crowd, reeling in mainstream audiences would prove an altogether tougher challenge.
What's surprising is not that the tabloids have gone after the movie so passionately but that they're attacking it for the completely wrong reasons. The problem seems not to be with the almost relentless violence – the stabbings, shootings and (yes!) the skull-crunching – but the fact that a young girl, not even a teenager, says a very rude word. Once. The horror! Ban this sick filth! Etc. Put it this way, if they could give the a film an ASBO, then they definitely would. And if they did, then director Matthew Vaughn (here playing a blinder on the back of Neil Gaiman fantasy adap Stardust) should wear it like a badge of honour because the fact is that as well as being a completely and utterly genius action movie, Kick Ass is a remarkably moral film. In the universe of Kick Ass, the good guys get hurt, the bad guys get their dues and no matter what side you're on, family holds everything together. And at the centre of it, a comic-book store where the geeks hang out, the girls drink coffee and everyone (everyone) dreams of being a superhero.
Our guide through this ultra-violent world is Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) who one day decides to get his own back on the local scum and villainy by donning a rubber costume and taking to the streets as Kick-Ass, costumed hero and scourge of crims everywhere. Needless to say, he's rubbish, his first encounter ending up in a trip to the nearest ER.
But after a YouTube video of his misadventures transforms him into an internet celebrity, Kick-Ass soon secures the attention of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), a father-daughter team on a mission of vengeance against local mob boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) and before he knows it, Lizewski finds himself at the centre of an almighty battle royale in which he has to summon the superhero within, rise up to the challenge and defeat the bad guys once and for all.
In the title role, Brit actor Johnson (coming off the back of an acclaimed turn as a young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy) plays it pitch-perfect, completely believable as an ordinary teenager playing around in a dangerous world he doesn't yet understand. He's the heart and soul of the movie and, weirdly, would have made a good Peter Parker.
Cage, meanwhile, goes all Adam West on our asses as the Batman-wannabe Big Daddy, a loving if psychologically unhinged father who's as comfortable taking his “Baby Doll” for ice cream as he is letting her shop for bazookas. He literally brings his daughter to the slaughter. The good news is that after a series of disappointing and occasionally just weird career choices (The Wicker Man, Next, Bangkok Dangerous, Knowing) Cage has suddenly found his form with a performance that harks back to that Wild At Heart craziness that made everyone fall in love with him in the first place. He also gets his own signature scene, an audacious warehouse take-down reminiscent of the drug factory massacre in Robocop.
And as the instantly iconic Hit Girl, tweenage assassin and all-round harbinger of pain, rising star Moretz (so adorable in last year's indie hit 500 Days of Summer) isn't so much lightning-in-a-bottle as carnage-in-a-can, serving up a body count that would make Rorschach blush and Charles Bronson proud. She gets the best lines (the aforementioned four-letter salvo) and the coolest kills (check out the way she dispatches the doormen in the most brutal lobby shoot-out since The Matrix) and is generally brilliant throughout. Think Dakota Fanning. With massive balls. And a Heckler & Koch USP Compact.
Arguably the real star of the movie, however, is Matthew Vaughn. The Layer Cake director here reveals previously unseen action chops, orchestrating some of the wildest on-screen havoc in recent years. This is hyper-kinetic, balls-to-the-wall stuff that takes big risks with a small budget. Take for instance the strobe-lit shoot-out that kick starts the final act of the movie. A mix of first-person shooter and slasher horror, it has a bravado that channels the spirit of early John Woo or T2-form James Cameron. And the final showdown, which recalls the blood-spilling chaos of Kill Bill Vol.1's “House of Blue Leaves” sequence, is genuinely jaw-dropping stuff, achieving head-spinning levels of annihilation and climaxing with a bona fide crowd-pleasing moment that pushes Kick-Ass centre-stage exactly when it counts. In other words, not the kind of thing you'd expect from the man behind Stardust. It's like finding out your dad's Santa Claus, or something. Yet despite the general gun-toting bad-assery of the action sequences, the screenplay by Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman (based on the comic series by Mark Millar) never loses sight of its characters. Every time he's on the verge of being overlooked in favour of another Big Daddy/Hit Girl assault, the action always comes back to Kick-Ass and his journey.
The film is not perfect. Big Daddy and Hit Girl's back-story is fleshed-out in a cartoon sequence that feels more like clunky exposition than a natural reveal, its inclusion driven if anything by narrative economy & and a desire to get to the (literal) meat and bones of the action. Furthermore, in a movie whose success hinges on the reality of its fictional universe, the relationship between Kick Ass and his High School sweetheart (played by TV regular Lyndsy Fonseca) is never 100% convincing – one minute she thinks he's a stone-cold killer, the next she's inviting him to stay the night. Kudos to the movie for acknowledging that, amazingly, teenagers do actually have sex (you can't exactly imagine Peter Parker and Mary Jane fucking in an alleyway, can you?) but the leap is too much, too soon. And compared with mega-budget competitors like The Dark Knight, the scale of the film always feels, well, a bit small, its independent roots betrayed by a limited number of locations and and episodic structure. A good comparison is the first X-Men movie, which did a cracking job of introducing its characters but only ever felt like the prologue to a bigger story.
But these are minor quibbles. The fact is, you've probably never seen anything quite like Kick-Ass. It's a pop-art explosion of blood, sweat and tears that slices and dices its way through expectations like a kitchen knife through a kung-fu cucumber. And with the highly anticipated Iron Man 2 and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World due to hit later in the summer, 2010 is shaping up to be a bumper year for films that challenge not only the conventions of the superhero genre, but just exactly what you can get away with at the multiplex (let's be honest, 10 years ago, could anyone seriously have predicted that Robert Downey Jr and Mickey Rourke would be heading up the summer's biggest tentpole?) A genuinely independent vision from a director who's only just getting started, Kick Ass hits it out of the park, in the balls and up your bum. Your move, Edgar Wright.
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